As you can see from the video above, the pistol suffered its 12th stoppage (and the first gun-induced problem in more than 9,000 rounds since the ejector was replaced by Springfield Armory Custom Shop). It failed to go completely into battery after firing. Simply tapping the magazine at the beginning of a Tap-Rack correction was enough to resolve the problem… which is a good thing, because I didn’t rack the slide properly and wouldn’t have ejected the round if it had been the cause. Doh.

For the math geeks, Mean Rounds Between Stoppage (MRBS) is now 3,528. So if I had to shoot all thirty-one of the rounds I normally carry with me when I CCW, there is a 1-in-114 chance that I’d have a stoppage.

Also since the last report, one of my Wilson ETM training magazines stopped working with my carry ammo (Federal P9HST3). The gun experienced a failure to feed with the cartridge horizontal and getting stuck on the feed ramp. (see photo, left) It happened with every single round of the hollowpoint even though the magazine continued to run properly with ball ammo.

I tested multiple other training magazines and also emptied two of my three carry magazines with no problems. So, I simply threw the finicky magazine in the trash.

The gun was used for this month’s KSTG match at the NRA Range. I came in second place for reasons that certainly had nothing to do with the gun. A video of one of the stages was posted here earlier this week.

Probably the best use of my time was spending Friday with some friends & accomplished shooters including Ernest Langdon. Ernest was essentially the foundation for my entire approach to shooting a handgun so any time on the range with him is beneficial. I asked him to watch me run a few reloads and he immediately identified one of the biggest problems I’m causing by rushing the insertion faster than I can see what I’m actually doing:

I know better. I’ve even talked about it online and put time into tweaking my technique to do this. But having a great diagnostician watch you make mistakes is definitely the fastest path to correcting them

Ernest’s advice definitely helped, though. After spending the morning shooting in West Virginia I drove to the NRA Headquarters and got in some additional practice. I ended the night on a personal best F.A.S.T. with the SACS/Warren gun:

JV — Doubtful it’s the spring. The spring is 2# heavier than factory recommended and had less than 2,000 rounds on it when the stoppage occurred. I’ve been replacing the spring every 5k with no observed problems.

The gun had been lubricated the night before but not cleaned.

The round that fired immediately preceding the stoppage had a normal report and recoil.

I think it’s worth noting that all the guns with less than 10k MRBS had significant reliability issues early on. If you take the first 10,000 rounds out of the equation the numbers start to look a lot more even.

Any chance you can take a look at some of those alternate perspectives on the data? Things like MRBS in increments (0-10k, 10k-20k rounds…) would be really cool to see. That said, even the “worst performing” gun based on the stats you show has been a very reliable performer – so it may not be overly illuminating.

How many rounds through that magazine? Did it get cleaned? How about a spring replacement? Sometimes a weakened mag spring shows up as “odd things”. Ball ammunition hits the feed ramp differently (usually higher) than hollow point or “non ball” profile bullets, so they may feed just fine. Something that seems to help fix magazines is the rebuild kits from Tripp Research.

What Jon said.
Also, I had trouble with a bunch of mags from two different manufacturers a while back, but it turned out the gun really hated the brand of .22 ammo I had 2,500 of. I mean really hated it so only the first round out of 10 in a mag would feed. A different brand of ammo cleared that up. Of course, my rifle also hates that brand, but not with the same antipathy. It puts it all downrange without key-holing, but it doesn’t really care where.